prey to the longing of my flesh
by shen salazar
Summary: how do magicians die? — vignette.


_prey to the longing of my flesh_

_—_

Hisoka has been told to build his life with an ensemble of war and grief and mourning. With strength and beauty and grace. With a maniacal melody of shredded skin and hollow brittle bones. He's been told to embrace the courtship of death with a challenge, breathe through wilted gardens of dead flowers and lifeless skulls and savor it lest he becomes his own reckoning.

He's been told that his life was a performance. A show. An entertainment for the people above. A way to leave them amused, chuckling with bereft senses and empty brains. He knew he'd be an exquisite performer — someone that lives in grandiose because he did not deserve anything _less_ than perfection and splendour.

He deserved nothing less than a perfect opponent, a perfect toy, a perfect card and a perfect death.

So why does he lie in this void, bleeding from his insides with no recollection of how he ended up on death's doorstep? With _no_ challenge, no grandeur?

It feels like burning hot white pain, tearing Hisoka's bones to pieces he never fathomed he'd feel; It's... thrilling, he concludes. Thrilling how he's able to catch the smell of his own metallic blood that feels like his nen, sticking to his body, the thick red liquid all over him in one way or another. Hisoka's senses can feel it dripping. From his back to the low dip of the bones on his hips, his own — staunchy, rich crimson red blood — bathing him in the glory of gore and death whispering in his ear and Hisoka feels like cackling.

It's a complete mockery of his death for someone meant for the skies.

He should have went out with a _magnificent_ trick. A show stopping performance. One that could leave people infatuated with the mere notion of living and dying _and_ going out the exact same way, one that can make them beg for beauty in the face of devastating destruction.

He did not expect to bleed with no grace. He did not expect to feel himself tore apart bone by bone, peeled skin by skin. Burnt flesh by flesh.

It was unbecoming for a man like him.

A man of endless beauty and peerless talent. A talent so polished he'd make everyone who knew the Hisoka before tremble and pay attention, shell shocked of his brilliance. He wants to see their eyes go so wide he can practically reach them and gouge them out. It would be _so_ easy, and _so_, _so _fascinating.

He's a man who's been told to live not to be infallible, but to live to make people believe he was.

To make fools out of those who were already fools. Make them think they were more than what they were, let them scurry for validation in the end, and watch them plummet back to being pathetic and wretched and worthless.

Plummet back to feeling like Hisoka was feeling now. Searing pain comes back to his body like it never left and it makes Hisoka grit his teeth while his throat burns and his lungs ache.

Right now, Hisoka has nothing. He has nothing except for the throe of his blood adorned and broken ribs, making every single second of breathing an eternity. He has nothing but nothing, feeling everything at once like all his lifetime's pain has come back to hunt him from the grave.

Hisoka laughs. Coughs. Almost chokes on the gurgles of his blood. He laughs again, this time fully, the rich sound echoing on the empty vacuum (because it's only him and himself in this void, after all.)

He feels the blood on his cheeks, staining the paint over them, making his star and teardrop drip and trickle like rain on the surface of a glass. He has long been deprived of hydration and the previous scathing tinted lips are now chapped and marred with red. A red so potent, a red so bright it covers his lips like an accessory.

Hisoka could have gone mad for what it felt like long gruelling hours of bleeding (though for all he knew it could've only been minutes, could've only been an eternal loop of seconds), if he wasn't already mad. Wasn't already sick to the bone he couldn't be made delirious further.

Every now and then he hears voices, hears humming, hears delicate flicks of lights and curtains. They all sound like the end of a performance, end of a trick.

A flash of a card.

(One last laugh.)

A last draw of breath.

(For the finale.)

A click.

(Show's over, Hisoka.)

Lights off.

—

[s.] _how do magicians die?_


End file.
